It's been an interesting couple of days. I got up early in the morning to be at work by 5am which is my normal starting time these days. It was pouring down rain and had been raining all night. It was expected that we were going to get a lot of rain but nobody was predicting anything remotely close to how much rain we wound up with.
The above image (and all of them in this post) are captures from my dashcam. Leaving my neighborhood, nothing seemed amiss. It was raining pretty hard but there really wasn't much standing water to speak of. However, by the time I turned onto the first main road, things were different. There was probably 6-inches or more of water is some spots which came as a bit of a surprise to me.
As I turned onto the next road, things didn't really improve. You can see in the shot above that while the left lane has only a thin coating of water, it starts to look more like a lake in the right lane and beyond. It was like this all the way to where I work but it didn't really get any worse. However, the flooding was just getting started. Things would be much worse in an hour or so and continued to get worse throughout much of the day.
I left work at about 3:30. By that time, the rain had mostly stopped. Some of the flash flooding was starting to recede but it would be a while before it got better on more seriously flooded roads and neighborhoods. The photo above is right after pulling out from the parking lot of where I work. I was weaving my way through significant standing water and the first of many disabled cars I saw. Unfortunately, many people misjudge what there car can do or how deep the water is and end up stalling their cars. In many of these cases this is caused by vapor lock where where gets sucked into the air intake and makes its way into the cylinders. Water isn't really compressible so important parts end up getting bent out of shape pretty much trashing your engine.
Most of these cars are still moving but there were a couple of more disabled ones up ahead.
School was cancelled for the day so kids (and adults) were out trying to make the best of things by having a little fun.
I image that some of the first floor apartments as well as some of the vehicles parked at the apartments on the right were flooded.
I think they had this road blocked off because the flooding was so bad back in that neighborhood. Not only was the water deep enough to be impassable for some vehicles but any vehicle that could make it through and moves at more than a crawl would create waves that would enter people's homes.
As I got closer to home, water levels started getting a little higher. I drive a large vehicle and I hadn't really been worried about being able to make it through anywhere up to this point.
As I pulled down this neighborhood road, I started to get a little more nervous. Clearly, some of these homes were flooded and the water was getting pretty deep on the road. The only reason I was even going down this road was as an alternate to my usual route which was closed.
Things were getting a little scary here. Look how high up the water is on that chain-link fence on the left. Fortunately, there was a truck in front of me leading the way so I could see how bad things were before I got there. Just ahead, water depth decreases a little, at least for a short distance.
In this shot you can see how the ditch on the right blends in with the road. This is hard to see, particularly when it was darker or raining hard. More than one car wound up in similar ditches (or worse) and at least one person in the area lost their life that way.
Here we were coming up on the last major intersection before you enter where my neighborhood is. Water was starting to get deeper again.
Despite the red light, I didn't even come to a complete stop here. I was a little afraid to. I made sure no cars were coming though. At this point I think there were more disabled cars on the road than operational ones.
Here I'm driving on the road that my neighborhood is off of. It looks more lake a route you should travel by boat.
Now, I'm entering my neighborhood and if I didn't know better, I would swear I was about to drive into a lake.
...and my road looked like another river. It was quite deep in parts. Fortunately, it does not appear to have made it high enough to make it into any of the homes on this street. Mine was spared and for that I am thankful. It was much worse than this in other nearby spots. Search for flooding in Brevard County, Florida if you want to see some of it. We got up to 26 inches of rain in a 24 hour period in some spots. They are calling this a 1,000 year event. I've only been in the area for about 27 years but it is certainly the worst that I have seen in that time, beating out multiple hurricanes an other tropical systems that have struck the area. Some people blame overdevelopment or poor infrastructure. The fact of the matter is that the retention ponds an canals simply can't hold that much water. When the levels reach the height of the river they dump into, there simply isn't anywhere for the water to go. Unless they invent a water transporter that can teleport the water somewhere else...the moon perhaps...I don't think infrastructure was the issue in this particular case. 26-inches of rain is just too much to handle in such a short period under the best of circumstances...at least in Florida when it is all pretty much swamp land to begin with.
Schools are out for a third day tomorrow as some roads are still flooded and cleanup is still ongoing at some schools. I go back to work tomorrow (after things being shut down for a day) and hopefully things will be back to normal by Thursday...at least for the people who haven't lost their houses and or vehicles.